AUGUST
we were early last month, so we're late this month
Hello MAL friends - we’ve got a big announcement!
This September, with the generous support of the College of Media, Communication and Information, we’re hosting an artwork titled “Barbed Wire Fence Telephone II”, conceived by Phil Peters and David Reuter. The work will be installed in CASE W250 for the entire month, with open house hours as often as we can manage.
Throughout the month of September in conjunction with that installation we’ll be hosting talks about the work and about community media, obscure networks, and self-governance from the artists themselves and scholars from CU and elsewhere. We’ll also be hosting a Snail Mail party and a Make-Your-Own-Mixtape event. The full schedule of events is listed on this Google calendar and on the official CU events calendar, and we’ll be posting about everything through our social media accounts & on our website.
The first official event will take place on September 2 at 12pm (UTC-7) in CASE W250 and online. We’re very pleased that we will have talks from artists Phil Peters and David Rueter and from Professor Ronald Kline. More detailed information about the work and the artists is available on the OtherNetworks site.
Other News:
At the Our Networks conference held in Vancouver, Canada MAL Director Lori Emerson presented on "Future Histories of Other Networks", discussing the surprising depth and breadth of wired and wireless networks that preceded the internet and many of which still exist today. From packet radio networks to barbed wire fence phones, telefacsimile, videophone, telex, and microbroadcasting, she talked about how we have become so accustomed to associating networks with computer networks that it is easy to forget: networks have long been deeply heterogeneous and they also have existed for nearly as long as human civilization as existed. Our Networks also hosted a mirror of the MAL website on their local net, alongside a preview PDF of the Build Your Own Simple FM Transmitter booklet.
On the subject of the Build Your Own Simple FM Transmitter booklet - we’ve had 300 copies printed and bound and they are currently on their way to the lab! Those who requested a copy of their own should receive it sometime in September (it’ll take us a while to package and post them all). Once we’ve mailed them out, we’ll also host a PDF version on our own website.
Finally, we continue to make our way through the #MALbookclub reading list - for August we’ll be reading Mar Hicks’ Programmed Inequality. As always, share your thoughts about your reading on the othernetworks.net blog post or on our social media posts.
We’ll be updating with the full events schedule for Barbed Wire Fence Telephone II, so keep an eye out!
Stay cool,
MAL